


The Junior Paladins League

by Xeillyan



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe, Fluff and Angst, Fluff and Crack, Gen, I'm bad at titles and just don't know what I'm doing in general, Intermittent Angst, M/M, Space Dad Adam (Voltron), Space Dad Shiro (Voltron), the Garrison Trio and Keith are kids
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-07
Updated: 2018-09-16
Packaged: 2019-07-08 00:39:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15919440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xeillyan/pseuds/Xeillyan
Summary: In which four out of five lions have pilots who need to stand on their chairs to see where they're going, Allura is terribly confused by these tiny aliens, being Adam is suffering, and Coran and Shiro are Not Helping™. (Basically, Shiro and Adam are the Space Dads and it's both fluffy and incredibly stressful.)(T for language, because I can't remember whether or not I edited out the mild swearing in Adam's inner monologue.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I wasn't originally going to have Adam play a major part in this AU since I was only on season five when I started it, but I had heard about his existence and he was always going to be Keith's guardian in Shiro's absence. I have since found out that there really isn't much available canon info about him (so currently almost nothing for me to mess up on with regards to his characterization), and I couldn't find a way to leave him on Earth, so he's here too and he's doing his best.  
> I'm pretty much doing the entire first episode here, but if I continue this and do other things (some of which I've written), those will tend to be covered in a more disjointed, vignettey kind of way, especially the things I don't trust my ability to write and the things that hew pretty closely to canon.
> 
> I wanted to post this before my first year of uni really hits its stride, so I did not end up stepping back so I could edit this. Let me know if there's any egregious spelling issues, or if it looks like I fell asleep on the keyboard at some point because that is absolutely a thing that may have happened. Anyway, happy reading!

It's almost bedtime when the ship crashes in the desert by Galaxy Garrison just outside town.

Pidge sees it first, since she's in the middle of watching the sky in that area with her brother's old binoculars as she does every night from nine to ten-thirty. She scrambles to her feet, sliding down the tiled roof and doing her best to lower herself carefully onto the balcony. Some combination of her excitement and her meagre eight-year-old arm strength gets the better of her, and she falls down the last metre with a thump.

The noise summons her mom out. Coleen Holt hasn't gotten a good night's sleep since before Matt and Dad left - neither of them has, really, but Pidge occupies herself with her sky-watching and combing through the files she stole on the class trip to the Garrison - and it really does show. She's so tired, both in the physical sense and in the sense of being tired of everything, that it sometimes seems like aliens could land on Earth and she'd just blink, shake her head, and tell them to come back later.

She looks off in the direction of the crash, accepting Pidge's proffered binoculars, then blinks, shakes her head, and gives an exhausted sigh. "Katie, dear, I think you should head to bed early tonight."

"Okay," Pidge chirps, marching downstairs, into her room, and out the window into the yard, pausing only long enough to grab her backpack. Once she's out of the gate and onto the sidewalk, she plans her route and starts to run as fast as she can towards the desert.

After less than a block, she crashes into two small figures in hoodies, sending all three of them sprawling to the concrete. Pidge squints at them in the darkness, then gasps.

"Lance? Hunk? What are you two doing out here?"

"Well, we were having a sleepover, and then we saw that big comet thing crash out in the desert so we wanted to go and— ow!" Hunk rubs his arm where Lance elbowed him.

"You don't have to tell her everything! Anyway, you're like, five," Lance says, even though she knows he knows she's not. They're in the same class, for crying out loud! "Isn't it past your bedtime?"

Pidge checks her watch, then gives him a cheeky grin. "Nope! I still have a whole forty minutes. Also, desert's that way."

"I knew that!" Lance folds his arms and sulks a bit while Hunk laughs. Magnanimously, Pidge decides not to point out that if he knew where the desert was and wanted to go there, then he wouldn't have been running away from it.

"Hey, wanna hear something cool?" Pidge asks when they're almost out of town.

"Always," Lance says immediately, in the "trying-to-sound-cool" voice he picked up from a combination of action movies and his brother Marco. Pidge rolls her eyes.

"It wasn't a comet that crashed - it was a spaceship."

~<>~

Having already received his orders, Adam mostly tunes out the chatter coming through the tank speakers as they come to a bumpy, screeching stop next to the crash site. Several tanks are already there, setting up a temporary outpost so they can study the strange vehicle where it landed rather than trying to move it. Once he gets out of the tank, he heads over to the ship (there's no other word for it - it's definitely an alien ship, and both as a pilot and as a scientist Adam's first impulse is to jump in the air and make an assortment of non-age-appropriate sounds of excitement) where he's been assigned to assist the medical team.

(The same childish part of him that wants to hop around and sing wonders what kind of alien they've found inside, that they need a medical team. Is it purple? It'd sure be something if it turned out that these aliens are purple and decorate their ships to match.)

As he makes his way to the entrance, he hears a whirring, and then an erratic rustling of shoes trying to find purchase on sand. He looks at the source of the noise and wants to groan: it's Keith.

Adam sneaks away, preparing to scold the boy, when he catches a glimpse of something by the rocks by the edge of the outpost and has to bite back a laugh. The quiet fifth-grader (quieter than Adam had realized, apparently, if he's managed to sneak past half the Garrison's teaching staff) has stolen Takashi's old hoverbike, which isn't unusual, but lacking a good way to park it securely, he's opted to cover it with his bright red blanket, which he apparently brought along. On further examination, Keith is wearing his pyjamas, which are surprisingly suitable for stealth but don't offer much in the way of protection from the cold desert night. At least he has his hoodie... And, of course, his knife, sheathed securely at his side on a belt that's big enough to reach around him three times.

"You'll get a cold if you stay out here too long," Adam tells him.

Keith jumps half his height into the air, reaching for his knife's hilt, then relaxes as he sees who it is. He scrunches his nose, probably contemplating Adam's words.

"I don't think it being cold makes it more likely for me to c-con... To get a viral inflection," he declares. Adam waits for a moment, because if he doesn't then Keith will probably realize his mix-up in five minutes and suddenly shout it out loud, sneaking be damned. "I mean, an infection. We learned about that in school."

Adam ruffles his hair. "Sure, kiddo. But you might get some kind of alien cold..." He trails off, realizing that that's actually a very real and very terrifying possibility. He's read War of the Worlds - what if he gets an alien cold and dies? What if Keith gets an alien cold and dies?!

"Adam, are you okay?" Keith asks, poking his cheek. He's picked up so many mannerisms from Takashi, of course he ended up with all of the adorable and hardly any of the annoying... It occurs to Adam, not for the first time, that this is what it would be like to have had a child to raise with Takashi, to love with Takashi, because they were in the middle of raising and loving this precious, perfect little boy when all of a sudden the mission got in the way and Takashi decided to leave them both.

But it's too late to change that now. Takashi was gone for weeks, and now he's gone forever, and Adam is the one who's here, alive and on Earth with Keith. It's his job to make sure Keith stays safe, which definitely includes keeping him away from potentially dangerous alien crash sites.

"Keith, you need to go wait by the bike," Adam says. "I'll tell you what we find, okay?"

Keith shakes his head. "I have to go in there."

"Why?" Please, please let this not be a redux of the cave fiasco...

"I felt some kinda... Weird thingy calling me here. Like the energy from that cave with all the wall-drawings," Keith explains. Adam wants to punch whatever metaphysical force keeps dragging the kid towards random places in the desert in the middle of the night. Still, it's good to know where they stand - if the first (and second, and third, and fourth) cave incident taught him anything, it's that Keith just will not quit when it comes to these strange feelings he gets. He's an incredibly stubborn kid in general - Adam would like to say he gets it from Takashi, but he met Keith's father a few times back when he was alive, and he can be pretty mulish himself, so it's probably a combination of all three of them - and all the energy-sensing stuff seems to do is increase that tendency tenfold.

"Wait by the bike," Adam whispers as the final Garrison tank unloads, knowing his absence will be noticed soon if he doesn't get to his post. "I'll come and get you when things have settled down a bit, okay? You can look around then."

"I have to go in now," Keith insists, because of course this can't be that easy.

But Adam has common sense on his side, and he's had a lot of practice putting his foot down over the past five years. "You can wait out here, or you can go home."

Keith doesn't say anything, but he grumbles and folds his arms and sits down cross-legged in the sand behind the rock. Adam ruffles his hair, then goes back towards the alien vehicle; when he looks over his shoulder, Keith hasn't moved to follow him, so he counts that as a win for now. Hopefully they'll know soon whether the crash site is safe to be around, and if it's not, well, Keith's small enough that he can probably carry him home...

~<>~

"No way." Hunk rubs his eyes, and when he looks again, the spaceship is still there. "No way."

"Told you so," Pidge says.

"So, how do we get in there?" Lance asks. "Any ideas?"

Hunk raises his hand. "I have an idea: let's go back home. My mom made lemonade earlier, so we could have lemonade and popcorn and watch a movie and not try to sneak past a bunch of grown-ups into the big scary spaceship!"

"Nah," Pidge and Lance chorus, which is not fair because Lance is supposed to be his best friend, not hers. Chorusing is kind of their thing - or it was, back when they were little. They haven't done it as much since kindergarten, but that's not the point!

"Hey, I bet we could slide down that rock and get pretty close," Lance decides.

"Guys, I really don't think we should be doing this," Hunk says, but follows them anyway. Someone has to be there when they inevitably get into trouble - and oh, they're all going to be in so much trouble, he can feel it and it's making him a little queasy...

"What's going on in there?" Hunk asks when he lands, hiding behind a large rock next to Lance.

"Gimme those!" Lance grabs the binoculars from Pidge, then gives an overblown gasp. "Ohmygosh guys, I think that's Shiro!"

"What?" Pidge grabs her binoculars back. "We have to get closer and find out what he's saying!"

"Pidge, are you sure—" Hunk suddenly remembers the end of first grade, when the Kerberos mission was declared lost. He can't stop her from taking this chance, even if - yeah, they're just gonna go charging in, which is probably the worst idea he's ever encountered. But there they go, and he's not about to abandon his friends now. Besides, even if they get in a lot of trouble for this, it's not like those guys from the Garrison would actually hurt a group of kids.

~<>~

Adam isn't happy about the prospect of sedating Takashi, but it hurts worse than anything to get him back and see him like this, to see him panicked and thrashing and caught in an almost feverish state of nonsensical ranting. He clenches his fists and looks away as the med techs prep the needle, trying to focus on his plans what he's going to say and do when Shiro's really, truly come back, and then he hears a rush of light footfalls.

"Shiro!" Keith launches himself at the nearest Garrison soldier, who flings him aside. He hits the wall with a sharp cry, then bounces back to his feet, holding his side with one hand and drawing the little blade he always carries with the other. He's so small that it almost seems like a sword instead of a knife.

"Keith, go home," Adam tells him.

Keith looks up at him, dark eyes practically glowing with a rage and hurt that's painful to see. "We can't leave Shiro!"

He charges at the gurney, quickly slicing through the straps that are holding Takashi down. Adam winces as one of his coworkers picks the boy up, kicking and screaming, and starts to carry him to the door. Outside, someone shouts, and Adam hears people running around.

"Close the door!" Lieutenant Hershel calls. Before anyone can follow the order, three small figures sprint into the room. Adam blinks, then looks again and sighs, because one of them is Katie Holt. Despite their age difference, she and Matt were close, and it must be crushing her to see Takashi back without her brother and father.

Using the distraction of the other kids' arrival, Keith manages to wriggle out of the officer's grasp, and tries to tug Takashi off the table. The two other boys go to help him while Katie rushes toward the doctors' supplies, grabbing all the remaining syringes of sedative and a roll of bandages. 

Within fifteen seconds, most of the adults in the room are out cold and she's stuffing the bandages into the front pocket of her hoodie. Between the four of them, the kids are just barely managing to drag Takashi out the door, and they don't notice the officer coming at them. Fortunately, Adam does, and he flings the other man into the wall with a non-negligible amount of vindictive satisfaction.

(Adam does not take kindly to people hurting his kid, even if said kid was in the process of breaking into a high clearance and potentially unsafe crash site after he specifically told him to wait outside. They are going to have a serious talk about that, once he makes sure Keith didn't break anything when that jerk threw him.)

"We'll help keep him upright if you carry him," Katie declares, passing Takashi's remaining human arm (which is good, because he does not want to think about the other one right now) to Adam, who leans down to sling it over his shoulder.

"I'll get the hoverbike fired up," Keith declares, running out the door.

"No, I will!" The shorter of the other boys shoots off after him, and their bickering fades into the distance, leaving Adam and the other two to carry Takashi.

"Hunk, you distract the soldiers," Katie orders. Her friend - Hunk, apparently - gives a quavering nod and dashes to the side, shouting and flailing. Adam follows, going as fast as he can while carrying Takashi. Katie somehow manages to keep up with him, supporting and steadying them both, and soon enough they're stepping out into the cool night air.

Hunk rejoins them, panting. "So, do we have an escape plan? 'Cause I don't think my mom's gonna be very happy if she finds out we snuck out during a sleepover in the first place, but she's gonna be even less happy if she finds out that we snuck out to break into a spaceship!"

"I don't think we have any kind of plan," Katie says, surprisingly chipper.

"That does sound about right," Adam admits, smiling despite himself. She's so much like Matt that something inside him starts to ache. 

Before he can think too much about that, he notices Hunk starting to shiver. He steps toward the boy, then looks to Katie, because he's actually not great with kids who aren't Keith. She starts to say something, but it's drowned out by the sound of the hoverbike's engines and somebody screaming.

"Get on!" Keith yells, scooting backwards and pushing the other boy with him to let Katie and Hunk on. Adam lays Takashi down so the kids can make sure he stays on - Keith and the third boy are working together to use Keith's blanket as a makeshift seatbelt for the five of them, he notes with a combination of pride and amusement - then gets on himself and starts to drive away from the Garrison vehicles.

The kid whose name he still doesn't know gives a loud whoop. "This is actually pretty fun with someone who knows how to fly!"

"I know how to fly!" Keith protests. "Adam let me try the simulator last week, and I made it all the way to level five!"

"Aw, man. You have the coolest dad." Adam's heart briefly soars when he notices that Keith isn't bothering to correct the other boy's assumption.

"Actually, Lance, I'm pretty sure my dad's cooler," Katie says haughtily. "Empirically speaking."

"I'll show you empirically—"

"Guys? Hey, guys," Hunk calls, sounding vaguely ill, "I think some of those tanks are going somewhere else. Is that bad?"

"They know where I live," Adam realizes. "They'll be checking there first, if we get away."

"So it's pretty bad," Katie concludes. Hunk groans.

"Adam, the shack! They don't know about the shack," Keith shouts.

"Good idea! I'll go through the cliffs to lose them," Adam calls back. "Kids, I need you all to lean left!" They do, sending the hoverbike banking sharply onto a path up the cliffside. With a few more maneuvers of the same kind, they're heading off a cliff and into the safety of the desert.

(Adam really wishes he had a saner definition of "safe", but hey, apparently this is his life now.)

(He's... Actually not too broken up about that.)

~<>~

Shiro wakes up to a wood ceiling, hot, dry air, and only a fuzzy recollection of being offered a chance to fly to the edge of the solar system (give or take a few disjointed glances into what came after). He sits up with a groan, feeling some resistance from the blanket - blankets? There are two, a plain white sheet and a very familiar red quilt - and looks down to find three sleeping kids curled up on top of his legs while Adam sits next to him, also asleep. 

He looks around the room and he knows he's seen before even if he can't quite place it, but before he can think about that too much, he notices a pair of exhausted purple-grey eyes staring at him.

"Shiro? Shiro!" Keith launches himself over the other kids (well, almost over - he accidentally steps on one in the process) and wraps his arms around Shiro. "Hey guys, Shiro's awake!"

The closest kid, a brown-haired girl who bears a striking resemblance to Matt, immediately crawls closer to him and starts in with a barrage of questions. "Why were you gone for so long? What happened to the rest of the crew? Are they okay?"

"Are you okay?" The boy who Keith stepped on puts in, rubbing his shoulder. The fourth kid is still asleep.

Adam starts to rub the sleep out of his eyes, giving a bleary grin. "It's good to have you back."

"We really missed you," Keith says, ending the hug now that his friends (Shiro assumes - his memories are getting a little less muddled, or at least the older ones are, and he knows that if they weren't friends, there's no way Keith would have let them into his parents' cabin) are paying attention. "It's been a whole entire year. Where were you?"

It's an innocent question, and it makes sense that someone would ask it, and yet it sends Shiro spiralling back, back into his mind, back in time through a jumble of memories of dark metal and purple skin and purple light and pain, pain, pain—!

When he finally managed to force his consciousness into the here and now, he sees five concerned faces and feels Adam's supportive hand on his shoulder. He can't quite tell through his own tremors, but his boyfriend's touch feels oddly hesitant.

He files that away for later, though, because through the haze of his memories, he's remembered something more important.

"They're coming," he gasps.

Adam looks down at him, eyes wide. "Who's coming? Takashi, calm down, you're not making any sense..."

"What happened on that mission?" The little girl persists.

"Katie, maybe now isn't the right time," Adam says gently.

"Katie Holt? Matt's sister?" Shiro asks, because that would make a lot of sense, actually.

"That's right! But my friends call me Pidge," she declares. "So where were you? Where are Matt and Dad?"

"I..." Shiro winces. "I remember a ship. We were captured by these purple aliens, and... It's all blurry, but I remember hearing something about them coming here to look for... A weapon, I think? They said it's called Voltron, and it's the only thing that can stop them from taking over the rest of the universe..."

Pidge's eyes widen in recognition. "Voltron? I hear that whenever I take my scanners up to the roof - it's the only thing I can pick up! So it's actually some kind of alien superweapon? And it's here?"

"Maybe—" Shiro winces, encountering a wall of pain in his mind as he tries to recall. "My memory's really fuzzy, I don't know. Adam, I don't suppose you've heard of anything that might match that description?" It's a feeble attempt at a joke, just to lighten the mood a little - for the kids' sake as well as his own - but he sees a strange look pass between Keith and Adam.

"I think I might know where it is," Keith says slowly.

Adam nods. "It would make a certain kind of sense, all things considered..."

And damn if that isn't one of the more ominous things Shiro has heard his boyfriend say in all their years together. "What do you mean?"

"A few months ago, Keith started to get these episodes. He'd almost go into a trance, talking about how something was calling him and he had to go to it, and, well..." Adam sighs. "After the fourth time I found him sneaking out into the desert in the middle of the night, I agreed to take him looking for whatever that something was."

"And what was it?" The boy whose name Shiro still doesn't know asks, taking a break from shaking his sleeping friend.

"It was a cave with a bunch of weird drawings in it," Keith says.

"They're petroglyphs," Adam elaborates, "but I've been working on comparing the photos we took of them to photos of petroglyphs in other places, and they don't look like anything I've found so far. If there's an alien artefact hidden anywhere near here, there might be a clue in that cave."

And that's how Shiro finds himself hiking through the desert with his boyfriend, Keith, and Matt's little sister and two of her classmates (Lance and Hunk, he learns through the former's rather exuberant introduction), while wearing Keith's father's old clothes because it's not exactly feasible to run over to the Garrison and pick up a spare uniform at this point.

The hoverbike broke down sometime after their escape, but even on it, it would probably take at least an hour to reach this cave. As it stands, it takes them until mid-afternoon. The petroglyphs are pretty impressive - he's no expert on archaeology and can't begin to guess at their significance, but something about them calls out to him.

The kids seem to feel the same way, all looking almost spellbound as they reach out their hands to explore the lines etched into the rock. Adam just seems confused, but Shiro doesn't have more than a split-second to think about that before a sharp blue glow spreads out from Lance's fingertips, racing across the drawings and onto the cracks in the floor around their feet.

Somehow, the kids find the ensuing drop down a waterfall and into a eerily-lit cavern fun. Shiro doesn't mind it, and neither does Adam - their shared profession is far from tolerant to any fear of sudden falls - but he doesn't particularly enjoy it, either.

"Can we do that again?" Keith asks.

"It's like a literal water-slide!" Pidge cheers.

"Whoa! Guys, what's that?" Lance's awed shout draws everyone's attention to the source of the strange light and buzzing that echoes through the cavern: a huge blue and white metal cat-thing, behind some kind of glowing geodesic dome.

Immediately, the excitement from the waterfall and the cave above is forgotten as all four children rush towards the barrier. Pidge reaches it first, followed shortly by Keith, and both bounce clear off of it.

"Are you okay?" Shiro asks. Keith pulls up his pyjama shirt and adjusts his bandages (Shiro makes a mental note to ask Adam what happened later), then nods.

Pidge, on the other hand, ignores the question. "So that's Voltron?"

"Well, it seems quite secure," Adam says, running his hands over the barrier.

"Maybe it'll let us in if we knock," Lance suggests, doing just that.

To the manifest surprise of all present, the barrier drops, and a series of images and not-quite-words fills Shiro's mind.

"Voltron is a robot!" Hunk shouts. "Voltron is a huge, awesome robot!"

"There're four more of these things," Pidge whispers. "Think they're somewhere nearby?"

"I'm sorry, how do you know this?" Adam asks.

"You mean you didn't get the vision just now?" Lance gestures to himself, Shiro, and the other three kids. "I think the five of us all saw it..."

"Maybe Adam was out of range," Keith suggests, even though Adam is closer to where the barrier was than him, Hunk, or Shiro.

"It could be one of those things like with hearing high pitches," Pidge puts in. "Maybe Adam's too old, or experienced deterioration in whatever thingy that vision was transmitted through so he couldn't receive it."

"Could be," Shiro agrees, because that at least makes some degree of sense. Also, he doesn't have time to argue because Lance is climbing into the big blue space-cat.

(Lion, it told them in the vision, and he still needs a bit of time to process that.)

Shiro decides that if he can ignore the pervasive weirdness of being inside a giant metal cat head, it's actually a pretty normal-looking cockpit. It's kind of cramped with all six of them in there, Shiro and Adam and the kids crowding for floor space behind the pilot chair while Lance pokes at the controls. Shiro's eyes widen in panic, because he doesn't know how, but he's pretty sure he knows what those two levers do.

"Wait, Lance—"

And then they're blasting out to the edge of the solar system, going through some kind of portal to an ancient castle with technology parsecs and parsecs ahead of anything they have on Earth, and meeting an alien princess who claims that Shiro and the kids are the only ones who can form Voltron and save the universe from the Galra Empire. She mentions Zarkon, and Shiro remembers - fragments, not everything, but enough to know that he has to keep these kids safely away from him, and says so.

The princess frowns. "I understand your concern, but you cannot simply abandon the universe to Zarkon!"

"I know that better than anyone," Shiro begins, then stops. He can't think of a good argument: if he and the kids really are the only ones who can form Voltron, and Voltron really is the only thing that can stop Zarkon, how can he possibly tell them to sit this one out? Even if they could go back to Earth and let the kids have a normal childhood - which is looking pretty unlikely at this point - it's not as if Zarkon is going to wait for them to be ready, or even for them to be tall enough to see over their lions' dashboards. Besides, while he can't speak for the other three, he knows Keith well enough to know that the only thing telling him not to fight Zarkon would do would be to guarantee that he'd find some way to fight Zarkon anyway, with less preparation and no adults there to protect him. He's stubborn like that.

Fortunately, before Shiro has to say either of two things he knows he'll regret, his amazing boyfriend steps in. (Something still feels off between them, but he figures they'll have plenty of time to sort that out. Maybe it's just a side effect of his memory loss.)

"Why can't we do it?" Adam asks, gesturing to himself, Shiro, Allura, and Coran in turn. "I understand that Lance has already bonded with the Blue Lion, but can't the four remaining lions be piloted by the four of us?"

Allura shakes her head. "I'm afraid it doesn't work that way. When you entered the Castle, the scanners verified the presence of all five chosen Paladins in the ballroom; as Coran and I were not there, we cannot be Paladins. I knew the original Paladins well as friends of my father, and I recognized their traits at once in Shiro and the children. There is no doubt in my mind that the lions will accept them as the next Paladins of Voltron."

Adam makes a strangled noise even as the kids start to talk excitedly among themselves.

"I wonder what it'll be like to fly a lion," Keith says, clearly awed.

"I wonder what it's like to fly," Hunk adds. "My mom always says she doesn't get carsick when she's driving, so maybe I won't feel sick when I'm flying my very own lion!"

Pidge seems a little more hesitant. "I hope mine likes me... You said your lion talked to you, right, Lance? It's weird to think of ships talking. Do they have personalities? What if I don't get along with my lion? What if it's a mean lion? What if it hears me wondering about whether it's a mean lion and I hurt its feelings by accident?"

"Well, Blue's clearly the best lion ever, but I bet yours are all pretty great, too," Lance declares. "And they're all a part of the same thing, right? So they must all be friends with each other, and Blue would never be friends with a mean lion." Shiro isn't really sure he follows that logic, but it seems to make enough sense to Pidge, and she calms visibly.

Allura touches something, and a 3D star map expands over the room. With a gesture, she conjures four holograms of vibrantly-coloured metal lions, two together and two far apart. "The Black Lion is in this very castle, sealed behind a door that can only be unlocked by all four other lions, and I've been able to locate the Green and Yellow Lions on planets that are, to my knowledge, peaceful. The Red Lion is proving somewhat more difficult to track down, but I believe that it should reveal itself once we've performed some maintenance on the Castle. After ten thousand years, it's only natural that it might need some work."

"Me and Blue can fly Hunk out to get Yellow," Lance volunteers.

"Blue and I," Keith corrects him, probably more to be obnoxious than because he actually cares about the other boy's minor grammatical error.

Lance frowns. "You can't fly Blue. She's my lion, not yours."

"He was being pedantic," Pidge contributes, nodding sagely.

"See? Pidge agrees with me!" Lance sticks out his tongue. Keith jumps at him, and the two boys start wrestling. Immediately, Shiro goes to them and picks Keith up by the scruff of his neck, while Adam does the same for Lance. (Apparently, the scruff reflex thing only happens to Keith, or at least it doesn't appear affect Lance. Shiro files this new information away for future reference, because if this is really a thing that's happening, he's going to have to get used to taking care of three more children as fast as possible.)

(That realization might just be the scariest thing he's ever faced, including whatever nightmares he's forgotten from while he was Zarkon's prisoner.)

"I'll go with Lance and Hunk," Adam volunteers, setting Lance down next to the hologram of the Yellow Lion.

"Then I'll take Pidge to get the Green Lion," Shiro decides. "Do you have a ship we could use to get there?"

Coran nods. "I'll prepare a pod."

"What about me?" Keith asks.

"Stay here until we get back," Adam says. Keith deflates, and Shiro knows in that moment that if he doesn't do something, the boy is going to sneak onto either the Blue Lion or the pod that Coran's preparing.

"Why don't we go see if Coran has a spare pod that you can practice flying?" Shiro offers.

"Really?" Keith looks up at him, starry-eyed.

"First, you'll all need your Paladin armour," Allura announces.

"We get armour?" Lance practically squeaks. "Is it heroic? Is it colour-coded to match our lions?"

As it turns out, the armour does match the lions, both in the sense of colour-coding and in the sense of being vaguely magical as it changes size to fit each of them perfectly. And it comes with magic weapons, too, for all four kids; Shiro doesn't know whether to be grateful or incensed about that, because on the one hand, the bayards will be handy for helping the kids keep themselves safe, but on the other hand, Keith is the oldest of the group at a few months shy of eleven and the princess has just handed them deadly weapons.

When they board the pod, Pidge is still fawning over her emerald green knife-taser-grappling hook.

"The wormholes will remain open for roughly two of your Earth hours," Allura announces over the communicator. Her next words are obscured by a strange whooshing sound as they pass through their wormhole and find themselves much too close to a serene jungle planet, flying at about three hundred metres per second and counting.

Shiro steers the pod into the river to slow them down, then swims Pidge to the shore with surprising ease.

"Whoa! We're lucky this is a smallish planet," Pidge says. Before she can start collecting data to calculate just how smallish the planet is, Shiro directs her attention to the sloth-like creature that's waving for them to board its boat. It's a little suspicious, but it's not as if they have any better leads.

One amazingly relaxing boat ride later, they're at a ziggurat-like structure that's been overtaken by roots and vines. Pidge climbs up with a distinct bounce to her movements that he recognizes from Matt, and a minute later, she's shooting into the sky in what can only be the Green Lion.

Listening to Pidge laugh and whoop as she flies them back to the wormhole, he can't help but smile.

With the help of the lions, maybe this won't be so bad, after all.

~<>~

This is fucking awful, and it takes all of Adam's willpower not to let out his feelings about the situation by cursing a blue streak and forcibly turning the lion around. He manages to rationalize his inaction with the memory of Allura's words about how the lions only let certain people fly them - if he takes the controls from Lance, who knows if he'll be able to do anything with them - but if it were up to him, they'd be back in the relative safety of the Castle by now.

And therein lies the problem: it's not up to him. Rather, it's up to a ten-year-old boy who's just been told he's got some kind of magical connection with a space lion and still hasn't quite come off the high from his first flight.

"Blue! Help me!" Lance screams, only pausing to give Hunk a baleful pout as the other boy throws up in a random compartment.

"Lance, turn us around," Adam urges.

"No way! The lion should be down in that mine, right? I'll drop you guys off and guard the entrance," Lance decides.

"Lance, turn us around this minute," Adam shouts, patting Hunk's back in what he hopes is a universally comforting gesture as the boy starts to cry.

Suddenly, the floor slides out from under their feet.

"Ope, too late! Meet me back out here in the Yellow Lion," Lance calls, then closes the doors and positions his lion between them and the Galra fighters.

Adam spins the two of them around midair so that he absorbs some of the impact for Hunk when they crash into the ground. Pushing his spine's protests to the side, he gets up and walks over to the elevator leading down the mineshaft, only to find that the console is broken open with frayed wires sticking out of it. Hunk scrambles over, then grabs one clump of wires in each hand and starts tracing them with his fingers.

"Be sure you don't touch the uncovered ends," Adam says, though it doesn't look like the boy needs any reminding. Within a few moments he's separated a pair of wires from the rest, and as he links them up, the elevator whirrs to life.

While they descend, Adam sees Lance luring the Galra fighters away from the mine. Whether it's adrenaline, talent, the space lion's weird magical assistance, or some combination of all of the above, he's actually doing a rather impressive job of flying in a high-stress situation.

And Hunk... Well, Hunk figured out how to repair an alien elevator, and when they get to the bottom he directs Adam on how to drill through the wall (Hunk being too short to operate the drill himself) so that they get access to the Yellow Lion without causing a cave-in. They may be kids, Adam thinks, but they're damn impressive kids.

With proper training and adult supervision - and magic space lions, of course, which Adam is never going to get used to - maybe they've got a chance against the Galra.

~<>~

Shiro returns to one more lion, a very stressed Adam, and the news that 1) the Galra found the Red Lion first, because of course they did, 2) the Red Lion is on a state-of-the-art battlecruiser equipped with an ion cannon that could probably take out the Castle's defences in a matter of minutes, because of course it is, and 3) that battlecruiser is in orbit around Arus, where they currently are, because of course there had to be a way for Coran's findings to get even worse.

"I'll sneak onto the ship and get it," Shiro volunteers, trying not to let his frustration show.

"The Green Lion's our best bet in terms of getting you there," Pidge declares.

"She's right," Adam agrees before Shiro can tell her that no, he's just going to use a pod. "Assuming their communications technology is half as advanced as their transportation, the Galra know we have the Blue and Yellow Lions, but will not have seen the green one yet. We can use that to our advantage."

Shiro sighs. "Alright. Pidge, you fly me up there and wait in your lion, okay?"

"Okay," she replies, just a little too quickly.

"What about me?" Keith demands. "You'll need me to fly the Red Lion out, won't you?"

Shiro considers this. "I'll signal through the comms when I find it, so Hunk and Lance can punch through the ship in the right place and tow it down here. Until we've done that, stay inside the Castle."

Keith pouts, then stomps off further into the Castle. Shiro makes a mental note to sit all the kids down as soon as possible and hammer out some concrete and thoroughly explained Paladin rules to help them understand that sometimes they just have to sit things out.

When they latch on to the bottom of the ship, Shiro orders Pidge to stay in her lion and guard his exit while he enters. He waits inside for a few moments, listening for her footsteps, and runs off down one of the hallways once he's satisfied that she isn't currently following him.

The sentries bring back memories of something, hard-edged and hazy, and he fights it off in time to duck around a corner and avoid a patrol. Next to him, he notices a pair of locked sliding doors made of thick, green-black metal, and there's a quality about it makes him feel something. He's not sure what, but they found the Blue Lion because of Keith's instincts, so Shiro decides he may as well see where his own instincts lead him.

He presses the button next to the doors with his prosthetic arm, and they open, and instead of the Red Lion, he finds a huddled group of prisoners.

"Champion," one of them gasps, and he doesn't really have any idea what they mean by that, so he just promises to get them out.

"Dad? Matt?" Pidge calls, much too clear to be over the communicator. Shiro turns around, and sure enough, there she is. She's somehow managed to make an ally out of one of the Galra's floating security drones (he shouldn't be surprised; she's Sam Holt's daughter, through and through), and she helps him guide the prisoners to an escape pod with what he recognizes as only mild sulking.

They've just input the Castle's coordinates and are in the middle of launching the pod when Shiro hears a scream ring out through his helmet, made tinny and fracturing by the faltering connection.

"Takashi, I can't find Keith," Adam shouts a moment later, and Shiro feels his blood freeze. Through the panic, he forces himself to think rationally - Keith wanted to go to the Red Lion, just like Pidge wanted to search for her family, and...

"Katie, is there something you'd like to tell me?" Shiro does his best impression of Commander Holt's "think carefully before you answer this question" voice.

She looks up at him with wide brown eyes, a little sheepish and more than a little afraid. "Keith snuck into the Green Lion and onto the ship!"

"That's what I thought," Shiro sighs. "Okay, here's what we'll do—"

"Yes! Good kitty!" Keith cheers, laughter coming through the comms loud and clear.

"Keith, are you in the Red Lion?" Adam asks, the worry starting to fade from his voice.

"Yeah," Keith mumbles.

"And what did Shiro and I specifically tell you not to do?"

He can practically hear Keith wince. "Go looking for the Red Lion..."

"Don't worry about it. What's important is that you're okay," Shiro consoles him.

"And that you don't scare us like that again," Adam adds.

Before Keith can reply, Lance's voice buzzes over the commlink. "We could use a bit of help out here!"

"Coming," Keith calls back. Shiro smiles and follows Pidge back into her lion.

"Hey, was that you screaming earlier? What happened?" Hunk asks. Shiro approves: if they're going to be a team, they need to bond as a team, and concern is a sign of a good foundation on that front.

"I kinda blasted myself out the airlock when I was trying to get some Galra soldiers away from Red..." Shiro definitely does not approve.

"What?!" He's not sure who shouts it first, him or Adam.

"But Red came out afterwards and saved me, so I'm fine now!" Keith is apparently doing well enough to use his arguing voice, which Shiro takes as a good sign.

Adam gives a long-suffering sigh. "Just get back here as soon as you can, all of you."

"Roger!" Lance chirps, then giddily whispers something about how he's always wanted to say that.

"Let's go get your lion," Pidge says, launching the Green Lion off the Galra battleship and back towards the surface of Arus.

~<>~

They form Voltron, somehow, and send the battleship crashing down in flames. Adam doesn't quite understand the specifics, but apparently it's quite tiring, and he helps his boyfriend put the kids down for a nap.

(And yeah, whatever they did must be absolutely exhausting - he doesn't know the others quite so well, but Keith doesn't raise a single objection to napping, which in Adam's experience has quite literally never happened until now.)

Shiro, for his part, manages to stay up long enough to be dubbed a "defender of the universe", and then passes out on the couch with a smile.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Paladins bond and get up to a bit of shenaniganery. A party is had - two parties, actually - and Shiro regains some more of his memories.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't really expect to keep up this pace of chapter updates (especially since I'm coming down with my annual mid-September flu), but I sure will try! If I can't make it every weekend - as I likely won't be able to next weekend, since I have a quiz bowl tournament - I'll aim to have it be every two weeks.  
> Because that whole "fluffy disjointed vignettes" thing kinda went out the window, I'm considering making this a series and having the things that don't really mesh with the current plot progression go there as one-shots. For the moment, though, have part one of the Fall of the Castle of Lions arc!

The pods are an amazing piece of technology. Adam would have preferred it if Takashi and the four kids hadn't needed to make use of said technology, but the fact that they did - coupled with the fact that the pod healed Keith's cracked ribs, which should have taken a month or more to completely recover, in a matter of hours - has given him an idea.

So now he's glued himself to the infirmary, ostensibly to add his knowledge of human biology to the Castle's medical files. (Which, yeah, he's also doing, but whenever he changes topics, he flips to a different folder in the datapad and uses it's convenient translation functions to familiarize himself with the immense scope of Altean medicine. He says to himself that it'll only be for a little while, and says the same to the kids when they ask, but really, his search will take as long as it takes, and he intends to let it.)

(Love of all kinds has been a guiding force in Adam's life for a long time, and no amount of research could ever prove as difficult as falling out of it.)

~<>~

"What the hell is this?!"

"These are simple training exercises," Allura replies primly. "I understand that we need to start slow, but we do need to start."

Shiro rubs the bridge of his nose. He wishes Matt was here. He wishes the Commander was here. He wishes any other human adult was here, because apparently Alteans see no problems with exposing four small children to robot gladiators and invisible electrified mazes and Adam is too busy doing who knows what in the infirmary - of all places - to intercede.

(They actually don't do too badly with the robot gladiators - Keith has been swinging his parents' knife around almost continuously since Shiro's known him, and Lance and Hunk have translated their expertise with Nerf guns into a surprising level of skill with blasters, and Katie uses her frankly ridiculous intellect to become a tiny terror in battle - but seeing it brings him so close to a heart attack that he's never in a million years going to admit any of that.)

Back in the maze, Keith tells Lance to take one step to the right. He does, and walks straight into a wall. Pidge laughs and tells both of them they're dum-dums, but does not bother to elaborate on their fundamental communication issue (namely, that Keith has yet to realize that his right and left are not the same as Lance's). They both yell at her to shut up, and then go right back to yelling at each other until Coran gives up and tells them to switch out.

The next exercise seems specifically geared to turn the rest of Shiro's hair white from sheer stress. His mind goes into overdrive as he jumps back and forth around the circle, intercepting the training simulator's bolts before they can hit the kids. He tackles Hunk out of the way of a shot even as he throws his shield up to protect Keith, and while he's down, he gets hit and feels the floor fall out from under him.

The mind-melding headband exercise isn't much better, only the darting around to protect the kids is slightly more metaphorical. Of course, since he can't actually remember most of the things in his mind he's protecting them from, his options are to pull back from the link or let everything through, and he's definitely not doing the latter. The imaginary Voltron collapses half-formed a dozen times before Coran decides that they're not getting anywhere and should go back to practicing flight formations.

Within about ten minutes, the kids have gotten bored, gone inside, and vanished, because of course they have.

"Adam, Coran, we may have a bit of a problem..."

~<>~

"So you've lost the children, have you?" Much to Adam's amusement, it turns out that Coran can do a pretty good Dad Voice when necessary... And dish out one hell of a passive-aggressive scolding, to boot. "Well, that's all right. I'm sure they can handle themselves, so long as they've come back inside. After all, we're only in a Castle that contains sensitive and rather deadly machinery, and they've all of forty decaphoebs between them."

Allura and Takashi look suitably abashed - neither one can make eye contact with the moustachioed Altean, the former instead electing to look at the ground and the latter directing a pleading gaze at Adam. Which, no, of course he's not going to oblige that right now; of all the stupid, irresponsible things Shiro's done, misplacing four small children has to top the list.

"Can you think of anywhere they might have wanted to go?" Adam prompts, deciding to focus on coming up with a course of action now that Coran has chewed them out a bit. "Did they say anything before they came inside?"

Takashi juts his lower lip out as he tries to recall. "Hunk said he was getting hungry... And I think Lance might've mentioned something about finding Keith a better hairstyle? And Pidge just yawned. I think she stayed up too late last night, and we did all wake up pretty early with the alarms and everything..." That last point makes sense, since Pidge is even younger than the rest of them and even more determined to avoid sleep than a certain other child who also formed an arm of the giant robot the other day, and in the short time he's known him Adam has started to get the impression that Hunk is very frequently hungry, but the thing in the middle doesn't quite compute, because Keith's hair is adorable just the way it is.

"Oh, no! I cannot help but feel as though this is all my fault," Allura cries, her blue-pink eyes wide and her voice somehow too distressed. "Have I been pushing them too hard? I only wished to teach them how they might keep themselves safe while fighting Zarkon..."

(He holds back a laugh at that: yes, she "only" wants the kids to be safe while she uses them as weapons to avenge the death of a father with whom she still converses regularly via a magical hologram room. While didn't see most of the training first-hand, he's fairly sure that yes, it is at least partly her fault if the kids were feeling overworked and hid somewhere. Probably a large part her fault, in fact.)

Takashi puts a hand on Allura's shoulder, and Adam wants to roll his eyes. "Don't worry, Princess. We'll find them."

Allura gives a businesslike nod. "I'm sure we will. Why don't you go outside and practice bonding with your lion in flight while Coran, Adam, and I search for the other Paladins?"

Adam actually does roll his eyes at this point, because there's no way Takashi could be so gullible as to - wait, nope, he's turned and gone back to his lion with a nod and a wave.

"I will make sure none of the children have wandered into the generator room," Allura declares, striding out of the bridge's left door.

"I'll check the hangars," Coran says, following her. Adam decides to take the right door and cover the entire rest of the building.

He finds the four young Paladins on the couch, watching Takashi practice flying. Lance is trying out several different styles on Keith's hair and pondering each one in turn while the shorter boy chats with Hunk about planes; beside them, Pidge has stolen Keith's knife, which - oh, no. Pidge has stolen Keith's knife.

"Kaitlin Elizabeth Holt, that is not a toy!" Adam shouts, wondering why nobody else in his life has bothered to develop basic self-preservation instincts.

"My middle name's not Elizabeth," she pouts, then quickly turns back to her usual grin. "And I know it's not a toy: it's a knife."

Immediately, the three boys stop what they're doing and stare at her.

"Ohmygod why does she have a knife," Hunk whispers, sending Lance into a fit of giggles.

"Hey! That's my knife!" Keith protests, jumping to his feet. Lance tugs on his hair and he topples back to the couch, the two of them quickly spiralling into a wrestling match while Hunk looks between them nervously. Before he can deal with that, Adam hears a soft cutting sound from Pidge's direction.

He turns to look at her, and something in his heart starts to rip. Lacking a mirror, the cut is messy and almost diagonal, but there's no mistaking the style she was trying for: until Kerberos, he saw it on one of his best friends every day.

"You look just like him," Adam whispers.

Katie - Pidge - swallows, choking back something frayed and inscrutable. "Mom always said so. Did I get it right?"

Adam chuckles. This is the closest he's seen her come to acting her age in over a year. "Not quite. Here, may I?"

She nods and hands him the knife, and he mirrors the cut on the other half of her hair. She beams up at him, then takes the knife back and walks over to Keith, who has Lance in a chokehold.

"Sorry I took your knife without asking," she says, holding it out hilt-first. Keith drops Lance and accepts it with a nod. Adam gives him a look.

"That's okay," Keith mumbles. "Just ask next time." Her grin tells Adam that there will absolutely be a next time, but he'll deal with that when it happens.

When Takashi comes in and sees Pidge, he surges forward to engulf her in a hug. Adam knows they can all see the tears welling in the Black Paladin's eyes, but they're good kids, and instead of commenting on it, they join the hug one by one. With a blend of subtle amusement and the purest, most condensed form of the energy that can only be summed up by the word "aww!", Adam notes that Keith is even rubbing comforting circles on Takashi's back with his tiny, pale hand... His tiny, pale hand that is still holding his knife, and somehow managing to keep a smooth, fluid circular motion without stabbing himself or Takashi. Adam really isn't sure when or how his kinda-maybe-future-stepson got so good at handling a blade, and quite frankly he's not sure he wants to know, so instead he just focuses on how adorable the kids are when they're working together to console their two crying teammates. He kind of wishes he had a camera.

~<>~

The Paladins manage to form Voltron the next time they try flying together. Allura doesn't say anything, but the little smirk that's been on her face since they took off tells Shiro that she knows all about the group's bonding moment.

~<>~

The Arusians, Adam decides, are exactly as cute as they are kind of terrifying. Nobody except for Keith seems to agree with him on the latter point, apparently having collectively decided that the fluffy aliens' small size (though he notes that they're really not much smaller than Pidge) and cute ceremonial dance negate the fact that they sent a warrior to the Castle and casually declared the intention to throw themselves on a fire if Allura refused to watch said dance in its entirety. He understands the importance of diplomacy and honouring local customs, but really, is it so wrong to be disturbed at how many of those customs so far have centred around violence? He's kind of worried that one of their party - probably Shiro, Keith, or Lance, all of whom have a truly prodigious ability to stick their feet in their mouths - will say something that causes them to enter a duel to the death or a ritual sacrifice or any of a hundred similar, equally deadly things that they just don't know about.

So while Allura does some Diplomacy (capital-D Diplomacy, in full capital-P Princess mode) with the Arusian leader and the kids take the chance to play and generally act their age, Adam sticks to the edge of the village, watching.

Lance offers Allura a makeshift bouquet of strange flowers, and looks pleased with himself when she gingerly accepts them. After that, he moves on to making crowns out of more flowers, and gives Hunk and Pidge one each before aggressively seating the remaining crown on Keith's hair and running away to join a pile of cuddling Arusians.

Hunk is talking to an Arusian who's stirring a pot of bubbling liquid, while Pidge sits nearby, clearly bored. Shiro, who had been standing with Allura while she did her thing, makes to leave the celebration, but Adam gets distracted from watching where he goes by a tug on his sleeve.

He looks down and finds Keith, with a bird-like expression of confusion on his face. "Adam, how come Lance put a ring of dying plants on my head?"

"I don't know," Adam replies, managing to keep his voice even despite the fact that Keith with a flower crown definitely ranks near the top of the list of the cutest things he's ever seen. He has to thank Lance for that sometime, and maybe find a way to take a picture of all the kids in their adorable plant-based headgear. "Do you want me to take it out?"

Keith frowns, shaking his head. "Nope. It's my ring of dying plants now. I'm keeping it."

With that, he marches back into the crowd.

"Allura reminds me of him, sometimes," Takashi notes. Adam spins around to look at him.

"How long have you been standing there?" He demands.

Takashi hums. "Not long. Long enough to hear his description of the flower crown, though."

Adam laughs. "Well, it was accurate."

"Most people focus on the pretty colours aspect rather than the dead or dying aspect," Takashi shakes his head. "Normally I'd say it's just a Keith thing, but I'm starting to wonder how much of that might be related to all the magic mumbo-jumbo with the lions."

"Actually, I wanted to talk to you about that," Adam begins. He's been largely pushing the whole Defenders of the Universe thing out of his mind over the past few days, but he knows he won't be able to keep that up indefinitely. "I don't like that it's just you and the kids going out there and fighting the Galra. I don't like that it was you and Katie and Keith who had to sneak onboard a battleship."

Takashi sighs. "Adam..."

"Let me finish," Adam insists. "I know I can't take over piloting one of the kids' lions. But I can't stay in the Castle and watch, either. So next time, let me come with you! I'll ride along in Black and if you need to fight on land or inside a Galra ship, I'll fight with you. Takashi, I refuse to stay behind while you risk your life. Not again - not this time."

~<>~

"I refuse to stay behind while you risk your life. Not again - not this time."

Shiro freezes as the memory comes back in a rush ("don't expect me to be here when you get back"). He takes in a sharp, shaking breath, and for a long moment just stares at Adam, and—

And he laughs and he cries, because it hurts to think of how they parted but they're here, they're together, and back on Earth Adam came for him, saved him, helped him, and then went with him to the other side of the universe.

"Liar," Shiro says fondly.

Adam blinks. "What?"

"You were there, in the end. You said you wouldn't be, but you... I don't remember the crash, or not much of it, but you were there when I woke up. You rescued me." Shiro smiles, calm and secure in the knowledge that this lingering wrongness, the sensation of being somehow off in their touches and gestures and conversation, can now finally be put to rest.

Except... Adam's not smiling back. Instead, he makes a sort of strangled noise.

"Takashi, I..." He sighs, adjusting his glasses. "That wasn't my idea."

Shiro blinks, smile gone. "What?"

"Keith snuck onto the crash site - another one of those weird psychic moments, I guess - and tried to break you out. He... It didn't go well, but then the next thing I knew Katie and her friends were barging in, and she'd knocked out half the Garrison personnel in the room. I only helped them escape once it was clear they'd gone past the point of no return."

A gout of something unidentifiable flares up in Shiro's heart at that. It had taken that long for Adam to decide that he wanted to help?

Suddenly he recalls the day they left Earth, certain details that he hadn't thought much of sticking out sharply. The one thing that forces itself to the front of his mind is the way Keith - their Keith, his... Son? Brother? Ward is too distant, he knows that much, but as far as he can remember they never called each other anything but their names, which makes it difficult to find a word that encompasses their relationship - took longer in the pod than anyone else after they formed Voltron. He gets the feeling that "it didn't go well" doesn't begin to cover it, and as irrational as it is, he wonders whether it wouldn't have gone better if Adam hadn't taken so long to decide that he wanted to help.

He wants to ask Adam why, even if he didn't want to ever see Shiro again, he didn't step in earlier to protect the little boy they raised together. No matter how mad he was at Shiro for putting his dreams of the stars above their plans for a safe if fleeting life together, how could he have let Keith be hurt?

What Shiro ends up asking, instead, is this: "Are we still... A thing? I mean, did we break up? Because it sure sounds like we did."

"Shiro... Takashi, I..." Adam takes a deep breath. "I don't know. I still need some time, okay?"

"Take as much time as you need," Shiro says. "I'm sorry I didn't remember our fight until now."

Adam gives a hollow laugh. "You don't have anything to be sorry for."

"Neither do you," Shiro says, because he knows Adam is thinking it.

"I don't, do I?" Adam scoffs. "You were going further away from Earth than any human ever had, and I was so scared you would never come back, and the last thing I said to you was that I wouldn't wait for you! Dammit, Takashi, I made you choose between your dream and your family - why can't you just be mad at me?!"

Before Shiro can think of a reply, he hears a soft gasp and turns to see Keith. He's shaking, and his hands are curled into fists at his sides.

"Keith—" And then a giant semi-robotic gladiator crashes to the surface of the planet, because Shiro's life is a lot of things but simple is almost never one of them.

~<>~

They manage to defeat the giant gladiator and save the Arusian village, with Adam riding behind Shiro in the Black Lion. When they're back in the Castle and Adam tries to talk to Keith, he retreats into his room and refuses to come out.

The party feels at once too loud (from the Arusians' cheering presence) and too empty (from Keith's absence), so Adam finds himself drifting out the door before too long. He wanders through the corridors to the crystal room, where he finds Coran already looking at the projected star map. The older man is staring wistfully at a large star with nothing marked in its orbit, and it takes Adam all of two seconds to realize what it is he's looking at.

"What was it like?" Adam asks, remembering how the newer recruits at the Galaxy Garrison often feel better after being prompted to talk about their homes and families. This isn't quite like consoling a homesick cadet, but he figures the same general principle could be applied.

"Beautiful," Coran begins, voice lacking his usual jubilant cadence. "A few days from now, we would be heading to the mountains for the juniberry festival..."

He shakes his head. "But I can't let that get me down! The princess needs me to be my unflappable self, after all."

Adam chuckles, nodding along. "That's one of the rare less-than-pleasant aspects of fatherhood, I find."

"Indeed." Coran smiles. "He won't stay mad forever. In my experience, they never do."

"I know." They stay there like that for a while, staring at the holographic stars. Rover floats in from the hallway.

Just Rover.

That can't be right - the little pyramidal drone is almost always always at Pidge's side. Instead, it's in here, heading straight for the ship's power source...

He has enough time to shout out a warning and shove Coran towards the door, and then the crystal explodes and everything goes black.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time: Shiro worries about everyone, Allura gets some much-needed bonding with the younger Paladins, and said Paladins actually get to be PoV characters for the majority of the chapter! Yay! (Oh, and Sendak is a big meanie, but you knew that already.)  
> I promise in two chapters there will be more fluff and shenanigans. The only reason this story is currently marked incomplete is that this chapter and the next one are a two-parter; at any other point, the story could be read as completed. (EDIT: Also, I forgot to say... Thank you thank you thank you for all your lovely comments❣)


End file.
